Recipes

Before modern sodas and bottled juices became so commonplace, shrub drinks were popular beverages because they were a way to enjoy a flavored drink and also to preserve the summer harvest of fruits like raspberries and currants.

This raspberry shrub drink recipe comes from a 19th century cookbook written during a time when shrub drinks were especially popular because of the temperance movement. While some shrub recipes contain rum, many 19th century shrub recipes use apple cider vinegar as a non-alcoholic substitute.

To make this drink, you start by making a syrup with fresh raspberries, vinegar, and sugar, and then you add as much or as little of the syrup as you like to a glass of water, so you can customize how strong you want it to be. The flavor is a blend of tangy and sweet, and it tastes like summertime.

There are few dessert recipes that seem quite as traditional as old-fashioned gingerbread cake.

Next to fruitcake and plum pudding, gingerbread is one of the quintessential old-fashioned desserts for the holiday season, but it’s also delicious at any time of the year. Even though we usually tend to think of gingerbread as a holiday dessert, in earlier centuries, gingerbread was often served for special occasions throughout the year, like Muster Day, for example.

If you like baking with a sourdough starter, the best thing you can do to make sure you can continue using it for a long time is to make a backup sourdough starter.

Even though sourdough starters are usually pretty resilient and hard to kill, if you neglect feeding it for too long, or if you go away on vacation and completely forget about your starter, the wild yeast can die off.

Pizza is usually one of those foods that we think of as being in the junk food category rather than in the healthy foods category, but when you make your own pizza from scratch using good quality ingredients, it can actually be a pretty healthy food.

When you think about it, pizza is basically just bread with tomatoes and cheese. If you use organic, all-natural ingredients and cheese from humanely-raised, grass-fed cows, add some chopped vegetables and fresh herbs for toppings and avoid all of the extra additives and preservatives in regular pizza, it’s a “guilty pleasure” that you can enjoy without the guilt.

These maple-glazed parsnips are so sweet that they actually seem more like eating a dessert than eating a vegetable. And, believe me, I love dessert and I’ve always had a serious sweet tooth, so that’s not something I say lightly!

I know, it sounds pretty crazy to say that you can make a buttery, caramelized, dessert-like side dish out of a vegetable that you usually find in savory soups, but there are two main keys to creating a flavor that’s sweet rather than parsnip-y.

A few weeks ago, a group at my church had a pie baking social, and I was searching for something a little different to bake besides the standard autumn apple and pumpkin recipes. I’ve always been a huge chocoholic, so when I found a recipe for a chocolate fudge pie on pinterest, I knew I had to try it.

I’m calling this recipe a molten lava chocolate fudge pie because it reminds me of a combination between molten lava cake and a soft, melty version of chocolate fudge. It’s also a little bit like eating brownie batter, only it’s softer and creamier. The top forms a light, crisp crust and when you break into that the inside is smooth, rich chocolate.

If you’re not used to baking homemade bread, making sourdough bread might sound a bit intimidating at first, but once you get used to it, this bread is really much easier than “regular” yeasted bread.

This easy homemade sourdough bread only needs to be kneaded once, and after that you can just put it in the same pan you’re going to bake it in and let it rise overnight. Then, the next morning when it has risen, all you have to do is put it in the oven and you’re done.